3-D Mapping The World's Coral -- to Save It

[Narrator] Coral reefs are one

of the most important ecosystems on Earth.

They protect shorelines,

provide valuable habitat for wildlife,

and keep the ocean's nutrients in balance.

But they're also under threat.

Coral reefs around the world are facing overfishing,

dynamite fishing, cyanide fishing,

increased sea surface temperatures,

and ocean acidification.

Physically, a lot of these stressors manifest themselves

in color and in pieces of coral being broken off

or entire corals just collapsing.

For decades, scientists have lacked the fundamental ability

of tracking coral reef growth.

They attempted to analyze this through 2D measurement

such as a measurement tape

or gossity chain which estimate the 2D structure

or surface area, with the attempts to extrapolate

and understand the bigger 3D structures.

But they're all very antiquated

and they're all very imprecise.

In the last couple of years hardware devices

that enable us to capture the analog world around us

and then digitize it to bring it in computers

has become so ubiquitous

that we realized many new professionals

can actually leverage this technologies

to push their professions to the limits.

So I started working on a software

that will make high quality results

from any type of capture, be it photos or scans.

But it is designed with scientists and curators

and artists in mind who do not have experience

in a 3D geeky digital world.

[Sly] To create these models,

essentially every feature we want to show up

in the 3D model has to be captured.

[Tatjana] You take a picture,

usually about every five degrees,

and almost like with a paintbrush,

just make sure you paint it from all corners.

After we take the photographs,

they're post-processed for color, saturation, and clarity.

They're then uploaded to the cloud

where we work with new reality capture technology

to not only create the mesh

but also produce them for 3D printing

and also exporting them for visualizations online.

(gentle instrumental music)

I think the power of this technology of reality capture

will be fully realized once it gets in the hands

of citizen scientists,

people that aren't scientists in their everyday job.

Hopefully one day we'll have all

of the world's coral reefs captured

so anyone can go online, explore them,

interact with them and, ultimately, understand them.